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Last update: hunt stopped.
Irrlicht seems to be a powerful and free toy, and being equipped with some other none less powerful tools, such as...

- 3ds max 4.2 (for every damned triangle)
- GtkRadiant (Quake level editor, for doing nice .bsp levels)
- Artgem (for all the 2D artwork I do - this time textures)
- Digital camera (which is ordered and should arrive real soon - for photorealistic textures)
- spare time

...I think I'm going to try to make something. This was a basic list of what is needed and something is still missing from the list... oh yes, MD2 texture exporter plugin for 3ds max, I'm still searching for this one. And maybe a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 In case I really get some levels, mesh and textures done some day, that is.

Well, whoever was interested about my hunt - here's the things you need to do it my way.

Oh my god. Okay, It's not bad for the start.

But It's quite far from enough to appear in any game that expects people to play it.

If your game relies at least a bit on graphics, you better make text-
only game, because otherwise, you're just wasting time.
Here's quick edit and explanations below and then suggestions, don't feel offended, otherwise It's ME wasting time. Everyone starts from bg's like yours. At least most of people. Just don't rush on releasing a game and take a time to learn.



Now what I did:
1. First, pulled yellow lines from floor to locate center point to rely on later. This is actually wrong. But it works sometimes and as I said, edit was quick.
1a. Now, from this point, pulled green lines towards the edges of room. This gave me proper upper edges of doors.
1b. Redrawed doors.
1c. The phrase you should seek from tutorials is "Vanishing point system". Learn to use it properly, and you'll never have perspective problems. If you think you're far enough, try to fix wall where it meets ceiling (on this picture I edited) by yourself, I didn't do that.

2. These varied of colors are weird. Usually, opposite walls are one colour and other two are in another color.
2a. Fixed this and made wall colors less contrasty, MS Paint's default palette is strange and ugly, plus n00b sign number one.
2b. I forgot to change color of first door. My bad.

Okay, now what you should do:

1) From AGSForums main page click "Tutorials" under Resources Menu. Try some of them, if you find one that fits your style and mouse better, try to complete tutorial 5-15 times. Practicing is annoying sometimes and difficult at the first, but soon you will be rewarded by skill of drawing whatever you want pretty easily, so It's worth it.

2) Pick a random 3D-game. Like Doom. Or Half-life. Start the game and wander around a bit. Then Just stop and start looking at the walls. The angles of doors, and so on. When advancing in your drawing skills, you start to rate games automatically like this, It's something I'd call "examining with an eye of an artist" or something like that... It just comes itself after some time and some (hundred? ) backgrounds.
The advantage of wasting time like this is that whether you try or not, your brain memorizes the angles and later, a feeling how things should be develops in you. I'm not sure everyone feels like that, but - I really don't use vanishing point system much, often I just feel how this or that wall should go. And I don't miss much when rechecking with VPS.

3) If you're MSPainting, try to change for a better program. Adobe Photoshop is really bad choice beginners, because It's faAaAar too complicated. I'd suggest
Artgem!, Project Dogwaffle, The Gimp or any other you may find from these list threads here talking about software.

This will be a good start. Good luck.

OMG! Blitz basic looks sooo good! But it's... commercial!
<happiness reduces to -10 immediately>

Every moment like that increases my respect to AGS and CJ, which often seems like lonely happy island at the center of ocean.

Irllicht? Game Maker? Weird, but Game Maker and AGS are two GCS's where I just am able to bring ever the craziest idea into reality - opposite to even simplest scripting in any 3D-related GCS, yet they both use C++...Ã,  I'm going to try this out immediately!

Thanks!Ã, 

edit: irrlicht looks good. Which brings to question number two: What's a good program to make .MD2 files out of .3DS or even - is there any good/free 3ds max plugin to export files into MD2?

[still]

Hey, thanks... and I'm still on the hunt!
Crystal Space? But what's this? Open C source code only or what? I didn't figure out what to download!

Argh. Just tried to achieve something with 3d gamestudio and I'm still pissed. 299 entities maximum per level! Damn, I have to make a forest, this means that I have to make trees. Now, being user-friendly, I make leaves as 2-d sprites. three sprites, turned at all axis excactly 90 degrees (as they do in other games) make a leaf group. or bush. For every tree I need about 6-9 of these leaf sprite groups. Just imagine how fast I reach this damn entity limit, considering that 2D sprites and 3D-models with interaction of any kind are both counted as 'entities'! I was able to make only 20 trees... Not much of a forest. Or engine worth anything...

Doing things with any Basic seems stupid, because I have to build level editor first or something like that, I really don't believe I can script whole levels!

What would be really useful is a program that supports 3d models with already applied skin and UVW maps directly from 3ds max. Or has plugin for max which understands max's mapping and converts max files to needed format.

Damn.Ã, 
These 3D-wannabe-engines are giving me a headache. Back to old lovely X-Y-Only-AGS to finish my first game!

All PC games...

- Fascination
- Goblins 1-3
- Indiana jones & Last crusade (Indy3) (PC adventure game)
- Warcraft: Humans & Orcs a.k.a WC1
- Dune 2
...oh, and--

- Castles II: Siege & Conquest
(ready to kill for possibility to download it somewhere again!)

It lacks of depth. alot.
Try to shade, color and do whatever you can to remove this too 2D-ey look.
Also, try to fix all places where lines were done too hasty and cross each other (especially on left part of bg, house roof, clouds, many on bricks ).

yeah. Make his tail move.

I'd suggest you to try to draw different versions first to get best look for your character. For example, use more line tool! These free-hand arms of his look somewhat unfinished.
Then try animating.
Animating doesn't need any special program, I've tried many and actually MSPaint is best for working with smaller sprites!
It's all up to animator, not program.

I like the first one too. But maybe try to make menu options font a bit smaller and maybe move it to the lower right, under the knife.

Not bad. But with pretty nice graphics like that, using grayscale only seems a waste of beauty to me. A big waste. Then again, with red blood, and other scary & coloured exceptions, well done mixture would have amazing effect. If you're putting good amount of horror into game, that is.

You play Mark, a young artist trying to live.

Shabazjinkens, you're a hero. Can you really use blender? Damn, it even doesn't have recognizable "File" menu! And one view only? Huh. After three hours of figuring out how to see top, side and perspective views (spacebar-menu didn't do anything), blender is outta list, because  I have only time until october, then army and no game design for a long time. I'm not going to spend all this time trying to figure out how blender works.
Damn. And it was free.

Actually, I still have no clue. I liked 3D-rad alot because It's full freedom and 3d gamestudio because super easy level/bsp editor  but to be honest, I have absolutely no available cash to buy an engine. They're damn expensive too. Especially due currency difference between Estonian crones and dollars- $50 is about 750 crones, which is enough here to buy an used video cam or 100 litres of Coca-cola.

I'm sure that I could make moving-around and level design (roads, cars, forest, player models, wildlife, etc) with either of 3drad or 3d gamestudio. But when it comes to scripting health/temp/inventory, I have no clue how to implement this in any of these.

3d gamestudio has a powerful tool in it's model editor, called height mapping. Something like, I draw a map of a landscape in a paint program, viewed from top and program converts it into a real landscape, making brighter points on drawing higher (hills) and darker ones as an holes. It would be useful. especially when exported into 3ds format and used in some other prog.

So, I think I just try to mix all advantages of existing GCS's together, yet, I'm still looking for something that suits my needs best.

One of my biggest problems right now is the way 3ds max 4.2 handles character models. during walking or other animations, mesh bends really badly, because of lousy biped system and low poly count. when making all body parts as independent objects, this won't happen. But then holes appear. Anyone has a clue how to fix it?

I played some lousy game yesterday, 8-wheels hard truck driving or something like this, and It's engine had all I need. Only thing I could find out about engine that it was probably something called Prism 3D. Anyone knows anything about that?

I started my eye/mental health/social life-ruining career with QBasic and mastered it, so Dark or Blitz Basic would be most easy one for me to learn...

Or maybe really, see what shbaz is always talking about and try blender.

Sorry about Blender/shbaz joke though.

So, still on the hunt!

...I don't know if you've read my Blender plugs before, but it's nice...

No, never. Have you ever tried this?

What I do want to make, is pretty bizarre game. It's first-person view travelling game. Has anyone played "wilderness:The Survival Adventure"? (It's available at underdogs).

Something between this and oldschool game Deus, but fully in 3D. You have Inventory with food and liquid rations, useful items to survive like compass, knife, map, money and so on and in game, you have to travel around, even maybe hitchhike.

You have to keep an eye on health, body temperature etc. levels and this is mostly what I want to do. Big project, yeah, but It would be pretty cool, If i'd ever managed to make this.

While writing this, I just realized that such thing could be done with AGS too, but without real-time moving around. 

I've been trying out some 3d-CGS's (Game Creation Systems)
and haven''t still found any good ones. What I need, is an engine that supports .3ds models, large outdoor environment areas and easy scripting. Progs that failed:

* 3D GameStudio A5 (5.2x full) -- terrible scripting and impossibility to make fine-looking skins for models. Also, has very bad sky-texturing system and works with small levels only. Despite nice level editor and good dynamic lights, It's still crap.

* 3D RadÃ,  (3.0 full) -- Good sky box and camera system, fast and large levels. But painful skinning and bad lights & interface. Script system is pretty awful too. Plus, relies on premade objects, unless you won't spend 5 years to figure out how scripts work.

* Genesis 3D - for FPS's only. Crap.

* Pie in the sky 3D - Terribly outdated

Can anyone name something GOOD? Or I just have to learn C++ and start from zero, thus making my own engine? With GCS's like that, It'll be faster.Ã, 

That means Hitler's most important decission in the war killed 120 more times than Truman's. I simply don't know if you're not good in maths or history.

I don't think that dead human beings can be just counted with numbers. Wheter you kill one or thousands, you're still a murderer. But if you like math, read again. WWII lasted for about five years. Atomic bomb explodes and kills really damn fast plus - there was two of them. And doesn't leave much to bury - just shadows.

I like the way room looks like. So I couldn't resist and did color-it-yourself-edit on Darth's edit to see how much such room could be detailed.



I like the layout of room. But still, I'd suggest to avoid large floor and ceiling areas, because they're harder to detail than walls.

...you will see massive murders...

Good point, LostTraveler. There has always been more sick people than Hitler was and will be in future.
As far as WWII goes, I think that "Enola Gay" crew that dropped out atomic bomb over Hiroshima were alot more murderers than Hitler was. They caused more horror and death in 2 minutes than Hitler caused in five years. Why not post their pictures? Or Truman's? Or pick another random mass murderer? Hitler is just popular in some way, IMO.

Maybe it's just me getting old, but music is turning into total bullshit. There's nothing good to pay for, anyway. Just an ear ache.

Ah. Sites like this should be just ignored. The more attention they get, more such things will appear. Like after this thread, every reader checks out the page, visitor counter shows bigger number and freaky people behind all of this rub their White hands.
Eck.

Hitler pics are quite funny and serve useful purpose of reminding humankind some things learned from this worldwide genocide sixty years ago.